The present invention relates to an infant care bed and, more particularly, to an infant care bed having various devices associated therewith to carry out the evaluation of an infant and to utilize a test protocol to carry out the conducting of certain tests on the infant.
In the care of newborn infants, the infant is normally birthed in a labor and delivery room and the infant is initially provided with warmth and other care while in that room. One piece of infant care apparatus that is commonly used in the labor and delivery room is an infant care bed which basically provides a flat platform on which the infant rests so that the caregiver can carry out various evaluations and tests on the infant to determine its wellbeing.
With respect to such evaluations, there are a number of tests or examinations that are performed on the infant and, at the present, the devices for carrying out those tests either for admitting the infant or to assure that the infant is sufficiently stable and well to be discharged from the facility are generally located in various areas of the hospital and therefore the caregiver must seek out the necessary testing devices to conduct the needed tests. Such common tests include at least one of evaluating the infant's weight, the sucking intensity of the infant, the hearing ability of the infant at differing frequencies and an evaluation of the level of bilirubin in the blood of the infant.
Also, within each hospital, the staff may have different tests to be conducted on the infant and different criteria to successfully judge the test results in order to pass those tests. As such, with different care personnel attending to the infant, there is the possibility that one or more of the desired tests can be inadvertently omitted or not carried out in the manner established by the hospital.
In the normal course of the hospital stay, the various tests and evaluations, including the tests enumerated above, are preformed at various times and by the use of individual devices that sense and determine the desired information and there is no single infant care apparatus that is capable of attending to all of the criteria determined in evaluating the infant in order to qualify that infant for admission and/or discharge from the hospital facility.
Accordingly, it would therefore be advantageous to have an infant care bed that has available, certain of the equipment used in the evaluation of the infant so that the caregiver can readily and conveniently carry out the tests on that infant by the use of one apparatus and not need to bring the testing devices from other locations or move the infant from one location to another in order to complete the testing and evaluation of that infant. In addition, it would be advantageous to have an infant bed that could provide a means to insure that all of the tests desired to be carried out by a particular hospital were carried out on the infant in a consistent and thorough manner.
It would be further advantageous to have a infant care bed having the facility for the hospital to enter a protocol listing the various tests that the hospital wants to be carried out on the infant in an evaluation thereof, and have an input device to enable the caregiver to input data of the test results and to further have a display device that shows the check list for the inputted test protocol advising of the completed tests and the tests yet to be administered to the infant.